The ERF Project is motivated by the following:

• The lack of abstractions, services and tools for specifying, designing, implementing, monitoring, debugging and maintaining heterogeneous distributed systems (HDS)
• The need for a conceptual view of an HDS which includes structure and behavior
  
• Specification in existing HDS environments limitted to structure
  
• Behavior in existing HDS environments is "buried" inside application code
  
• Behavioral changes in existing HDS environments need to change code and recompile